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Honoring the Father of African Film

Monday, March 21, 2011 - 3:00pm

Filmmaker, author, and producer Ousmane Sembène, the “father of African film,” made ten films and wrote nine books over the span of his life, and, in doing so, inspired Africans to reclaim their narratives from the Western world and tell their own stories.

“[Sembène] saw how Africa has been treated in Western stories for the last two centuries,” Gadjigo says. “He appropriated the tool of writing and the tool of filmmaking to subvert the images of Africa that had been constructed from the outside. Then he used the camera to, so to speak, put Africans in front of a mirror so that they can see themselves.”